Showing posts by Nathan Budzinski about the last post

07|06|2013

During a recent visit to Kiev as part of a selection panel for a
call for sound and art works made by the ECAS network, I visited the Ukranian
capital's World War Two memorial. I made my way through the Soviet
era metro and out to the hills overlooking the wide Dnieper River,
with clusters of imposing looking tower blocks beyond its opposite
banks. After passing through a park, the gold-domed Pechersk Lavra
and Memorial To The Holodomor Victims (the Ukrainian
“terror-famine” in the early 1930s) I enter a pedestrian boulevard.
At the head of it sit kiosks and cafes, with small groups of
visitors escaping from the hot weather, sipping beer in the shade
of umbrellas.

The broad boulevard stretches out under the hot sun for nearly a
kilometre. I hear the muffled sounds of distant music being played.
Suddenly, a loud and mournful male voice starts singing in
contrabass right next to me. The entire boulevard is lined with
speakers, blasting out a loop of emotionally piqued funereal songs,
the sound crackling and warbling from disintegrating speaker cones
and what could be poor MP3 compression. In the distance is a giant
sculpture of a steel-plated woman warrior.

Further down, I come up to a large, covered section, partly
made of poured concrete, shafts radiating out in rhythmic echoes
from a Soviet star, embedded crater-like on a monolithic pillar to
the left as you enter. There are several grottos, with the tinny
sound of mournful singing reverberating around the cool space and
bouncing off its hard walls. A roughly hewn socialist-realist
frieze depicting rows of super-sized soldiers, workers and
peasants, sits against the hard edged abstraction of the concrete.
The march of figures lead through the grotto, and out to the other
side, guns, farming tools and reinforcement bars pointing towards
the warrior woman “Mother Motherland” (intentionally built just
taller than the Statue Of Liberty).

Onwards, past another large cluster of
gargantuan soldiers frozen in the midst of battle, two tanks face
each other with their gun barrels crossed, both bizarrely painted
in bright blue and orange, and covered in dots.

The elegiac songs continue, and from this
position the guttural stops and warped, soaring vowels puncture the
airspace with delayed echoes around the figure, the multitude of
speakers sounding out the vastness of the space; a journey from the
everyday to cosmic-scaled history at the foot of Mother
Motherland.

Here she is, gleaming in the light, a sword thrusting skywards
in one hand, in the other a shield emblazoned with Soviet hammer
and sickle.

Inside the
bunker-like pedestal supporting the Mother is the National Museum Of The History Of
The Great Patriotic War (Of 1941–1945), that tells the history
of World War Two and the Eastern Front from the Ukrainian, and
Kievian perspective. Finished in 1981, the building and its
collection are a time capsule from the late Soviet era. The figure
was designed by the socialist-realist artist Yevgeny
Vuchetich, famous for his grandiose sculptures glorifying
Soviet heroism.

The two floors of exhibits take in much of the horror of that
time, and aims to convey war through feeling, creating dramatic
displays. Like how a title sequence of a movie sets up a tone for
the following feature, music acts as a lead-in, preparing visitors
for the main event ahead and helping define the emotional
parameters of the experience.

The objects on show create a bleak impression: many are simply
bits of detritus left over from battles, rusting shards of metal,
decomposed boots. There’s the wreckage of an airplane, photos of
unnamed victims hanging on its torn wing. Panoramas of fiery battle
scenes are framed by soldiers’ heads cast in heavy bronze. A
cluster of old speaker cones emit a painfully high pitched static
tone (appropriate, though I imagine they were meant to be
broadcasting something different). Elsewhere a vitrine containing a
child’s jumper dangles off some barbed wire, tiny shoes sitting
next to a pair of shackles.

In one section, if any visitors might have
missed the point, a barrel of a cannon points at an old hessian
textile, dotted with pictures of victims, a flower pot at its
base.

In the last room are thousands of
photographs of people, surrounding a banquet table lined with the
canteens of the dead, phonographs placed intermittently along its
length. Different brass instruments are suspended in the air, a
swarm of disembodied horns mutely signalling victory.

The materials
used emit feeling: cold concrete, lofty marble and austere granite,
proud brass, melancholy bronze and energetic steel. All of them
strong and hard wearing, each resonating at their own sensorial
register.

The whole impression is one of overdriven,
screeching emotion. It's so bombastic that my first reaction is how
pushy and crass it is. My mind muddles the Soviet kitsch and
atrophied, dramatised feeling with the caricatures of the former
Eastern Bloc. And now updated to include cruel nouveau riche
oligarchs with their tacky gold enamelled Louis XIV furniture,
rudimentary capitalism and unrestrained ambition next to abject
poverty – and other myths help to reinforce old assumptions about
the East as depraved and barbaric.

Contrast the above experience with another type of remembrance:
the British Commonwealth’s various iterations of Remembrance Day.
They’re all based around a main event of two minutes of silent
observance by attendees – performed by veterans and active members
of national armed forces – and most usually organised around a
cenotaph (empty tomb, in Greek). Communal silence rendered into a
monumental sculpture. This silence is followed by a poignant, yet
sometimes incongruously peppy tune called "The Last Post", a bugle
call signalling the end of the day's duties, widely used in
remembrance ceremonies.

Compared to a ten hectare complex of reverberating elegies and
up-the-ante monumental sculpture, two minutes of silence seems a
stoically restrained and tasteful method of remembrance. But
crassness and refinement are to taste as politeness and rudeness
are to manners. They are spectrums in which public performances of
adherence to a social order take place. And both these examples
don’t tolerate much deviation from obedient behaviour. If the
National Museum Of The History Of The Great Patriotic War (Of
1941–1945) is a platform for individuals to play out a type of
reverential melodramatics, the two minutes of silence reach just as
authoritatively into the psyche.

Below is a video from the Australian Army Headquarters's YouTube
channel showing a lone soldier playing "The Last Post". They've
decided that it's more effective to have the bugler alone in the
posh architecture, with dramatic worm's eye views of him and close
up shots on blood red poppies and lists of the fallen on stone. It
plays off of ideas of restraint and stoic poise, but it also
overflows with a kind of melodrama.

As the distance from World War Two increases, its horrors slowly
disintegrate in the mausoleum worlds of mediated myth and pomo
relativism. The two World War's were proof of how we are always
precariously close to tearing ourselves apart. Remembrance Day was
started in 1919 and repeated so as to never forget World War One as
the war to end all wars – but memorisation by rote learning hasn’t
worked and never will.

Historian and broadcaster
David Hendy once told me that “ultimately when people want
silence, or when people complain about noise, there's a power
struggle going on”. This links the above examples of ritual and
memory, showing the role that power has in repeating these spaces
and rituals – and being the cause of this ongoing misery. It’s
clear that rituals of silence and melodramatic reverence are
preventative measures against noisily active remembrance, something
that at this moment can only be understood by the powers that be as
an unpatriotic, violent attack on memory. But of course this noise
would be a protest against hollow traditions, empty things used to
perpetuate war-mongering, and the greed that usually drives it.

Music questions power and authority as much as it reinforces it.
Kiev's memorial complex made me try to think of different types of
music and remembrance that act against this mind erasing
monumentalism. Enter that other ritual of self-forgetting,
nationalistic memory and feeling control: the national anthem.
Specifically, Albert Ayler's "Spirits Rejoice", a free jazz call
and response riffing off the French national anthem, "La
Marseillaise". Without irony it transforms all the hollow
rompitypomp of a national anthem and makes it distinctly noisy and
present. Its power lying in the fact that it has a very real object
that it is ecstatically freeing up, rather than trying to escape
from:

Comments

We create large scale abstract art performance events during Remembrance in London exploring how we all construct our opinion on war and conflict. Our 2013 event across over 30 streets was a challenge to the 'spectrums in which public performances of adherence to a social order take place' and a deviation from 'obedient behaviour'.

This years event was called Silent Cacophony and you may find interesting.